What We Are and What We Ought To Be

At its heart, the biblical heritage involves a proclamation: It announces
what God has done to help weary and overburdened human beings. "The
Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue," Isaiah’s Servant
of the Lord proclaims, "to know the word that sustains the weary.
He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being
taught." "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened,"
Jesus urges, "and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and
learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest
for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

Yet this proclamation resonates only for those who feel weary and overburdened.
Promises of help and mercy are heeded only by those who know they are helpless
or guilty or weary or sick. For anyone else, they fall on deaf ears. The
biblical message has virtually no chance of really being heard, then, if
its apologists cannot convince its intended hearers that they are indeed
part of the audience to whom this Good News is being proclaimed.

Until quite recently, most professional philosophers have been among
the deafest of the deaf. John Hare’s new book attempts to give them—and
especially the moral philosophers among them—reasons to listen again. But
he is also writing for Christians who are not professional philosophers.
For he wants them to be able to take advantage of the opportunities now
open for academic philosophy and traditional Christianity to engage in
constructive dialogue, and he hopes to help them to see how even their
understanding of the moral life has been influenced by moral philosophy.

Those interested in the intersection between religion and public life
have particular reason to the thankful for Hare’s book. For he argues that
much contemporary moral thinking is incoherent because it has abandoned
its Christian roots.

Hare’s thesis is this: most contemporary moral philosophers, no matter
where they stand religiously, take the human moral situation to involve
three essential elements. First, there is the overriding demand of morality
upon each of us to think and to act in a particular way. (For Hare, this
essentially means that each of us should be as concerned for others as
we are for ourselves.) Second, there is the fact that we are unable on
our own to think and to act this way. And, third, there is the inevitable
postulation of some "at least possible being" who makes and meets
the moral demand, and who is thus the ultimate source of its authority.

The "moral gap" is the inevitable distance we find between
what we can and what we should think and do. So the effect of moral philosophy’s
typical view of morality "is that it makes the feeling of guilt and
the desire to avoid its pain into a primary motivator of the moral life."
And, consequently, if we take morality as seriously as moral philosophers
think we should, we grow weary of the objective demand that it puts upon
us and of the subjective burden of always feeling guilty about what we
have improperly thought or done.

Now this way of construing the human moral situation, Hare says, should
strike us as odd. Why should morality be something other than "a paradigmatically
human institution"? Why should it prescribe a way of life that is
too hard for us? Why don’t most contemporary moral theorists construct
theories that fit the actual capacities of human beings?

Hare thinks it is because most contemporary moral thinking is still
influenced by traditional Christian doctrine and involves the partial survival
of a moral viewpoint that clearly made sense when most people actually
believed "in a perfect and infinite moral being," whom human
beings imperfectly resembled, and "who created us to resemble him
more than we do." In Christianity, our weariness in the face of the
moral demand, as well as our burden of feeling guilty about failing to
meet it, are addressed by the Good News that God in Christ has done what
is necessary for us to begin to live lives pleasing to Him. The Christian
proclamation, in other words, declares that the Being assumed by morality’s
third element actually exists and that, for those who believe in Him, He
actively intervenes to change the moral incapacity recognized by the second
element so that their capacities, with His assistance, become adequate
to the demand expressed by the first. Contemporary three-element moral
theories that abandon traditional Christianity, and then put nothing comparable
in its place, make no clear sense.

Because Hare is himself a very careful moral philosopher, he bites off
only what he can chew. Consequently, he neither assumes nor claims to show
that moral philosophers are right when they construe morality in the way
most of them do, nor does he attempt to show that traditional Christianity
is the only way to bridge the moral gap. Rather, he takes his task to be
merely to show that the secular alternatives to the Christian solution
are implausible as they now stand.

On his way to establishing that, Hare does several other good things.
He stresses, for instance, how much of modern philosophy (and especially
of Kant’s philosophy) is unintelligible unless the Christian commitments
of its writers are taken seriously. He gives us an illuminating reading
of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or which emphasizes that the weariness of the aesthete’s
pleasure-seeking life can be overcome only by embracing the principledness
of the ethical life, and, following that, that the burden of the principled
ethical life can be overcome only by embracing the freedom of the Christian
life.

That freedom depends on seeing our salvation and sanctification as accomplished
through our ongoing incorporation into Christ and the Church which is His
Bride. It is this incorporation, Hare argues, that gives us the power to
think and to act as we ought. In Christian doctrine, "the life into
which we are incorporated is stronger, . . . ‘abler,’ than our lives on
their own. . . . What God intends is for us to be vessels of his grace
to each other; and this grace of his coming through each other helps us
to live in a way that pleases him." There is also a fine chapter on
forgiveness that helps us to understand how we may overcome the burden
of our pasts and thus begin and sustain this life together.

All told, this book can give anyone who works through it a better grasp
of what it means to be moral and of how Christianity addresses the gap
that even most secular philosophers find to yawn between what we are and
what we ought to be.